Monday, 26 May 2014

South African Airways (SAA) has been taken to task by Solidarity, a trade union, over its discriminatory hiring practices for pilots. The union is angry with the state-owned carrier's decision not to admit Daniël Hoffman to its cadet pilot programme for the second year in a row. Mr Hoffman, whose theory and psychometric tests were described as exceptional by Solidarity, is a white male. That puts him at a handicap against other applicants because of the airline's self-professed bias towards hiring black, coloured (mixed race), Indian or white female pilots...

Tuesday, 13 May 2014

On February 28th an Atlasjet flight from Istanbul to Crimea made a U-turn over the Black Sea and headed back to Turkey. The pilots had been informed that Simferopol Airport, the main gateway to the peninsula, was occupied by unidentified armed men. Few doubted that the assailants were Russian special forces, whose seizure of strategic buildings would mark the beginning of the annexation of Crimea. It did not take foreign airlines long to see the writing on the wall. Atlasjet, Turkish Airlines, Azerbaijan Airlines and Latvia’s Air Baltic all suspended flights to the peninsula. So too, eventually, did Ukraine’s flag-carrier, Ukraine International Airlines...

Thursday, 1 May 2014

There is no denying that the past three years have been a torrid time for Egyptian tourism. Hopes of a quick recovery after the 2011 Arab Spring were dashed by last year’s military coup against the Muslim Brotherhood. The bombing of a tourist bus in Sinai this February further unnerved visitors, although militants have predominantly directed their wrath at security forces.

Tourism revenue fell 43% year-on-year in the first quarter of 2014 to just $1.3 billion, accelerating the downturn triggered by last July’s overthrow of Islamist President Mohamed Morsi. Full-year revenue had already fallen 41% in 2013, when just 9.5 million tourists visited the country compared with 14.7 million back in 2010...